Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order reinstating a federal rule known as the “Mexico City policy” which halts US aid from flowing to groups that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for abortion rights overseas.
The policy, which was first instituted by Ronald Reagan in 1984, is typically implemented whenever a Republican president wins the White House and rescinded whenever a Democrat wins. But this whiplash has major implications for abortion and reproductive healthcare around the world.
Related: Trump and Vance back anti-abortion activists in March for Life speeches
Historically, the revival of the Mexico City policy affects up to about $600m of international aid. During his first term, however, Trump dramatically expanded the scope of the Mexico city policy, which abortion rights supporters call a “global gag rule”. Rather than applying the policy only to family planning assistance, as was typical, the Trump administration applied to it to assistance for organizations that offer a range of health services around the globe – leading the policy to affect billions of dollars’ worth of aid.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion restrictions and their impact, the policy can cut off access to contraception, lead women to seek out unsafe abortions and cause tumult within the non-governmental groups that depend on US aid to keep their programs going.
“Reinstating the Mexico City policy will have deadly consequences for people across the globe,” Rebecca Hart Holder, president of Reproductive Equity Now, said in a statement.
“The United States is a vital partner to healthcare providers and organizations around the world, and robbing those frontline providers of their ability to provide the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare, and even information about people’s options, will result in people losing their lives to pregnancy complications.”
Trump also signed a second executive order affirming a longstanding US policy that prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. That order also rolled back two executive orders penned by Joe Biden, which sought to protect abortion access in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade. The fall of Roe led a wave of states to ban the procedure.
Trump’s executive orders arrived hours after he sent a pre-recorded message to the protesters who attended the March for Life, the nation’s largest anti-abortion gathering, in Washington on Friday afternoon. His vice president, JD Vance, addressed the March in person.
“With the inauguration on Monday, our country faces the return of the most pro-family, most pro-life American president of our lifetimes,” Vance told the crowd, to massive cheers.
Abortion rights supporters had anticipated the return of the Mexico City policy, but are still awaiting news on whether Trump will allow widespread enforcement of the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that could be used to effectively ban abortion nationwide.
Although abortion rights remain extremely popular in the US, Vance and Trump’s appearances at the March are a sign of the anti-abortion movement’s political firepower and diehard grip on the GOP.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, and speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, also spoke at the March – marking the first time in the March’s 50-year-plus history that the leaders of both chambers of Congress had ever done so.
